Some of these could use “Nightdive” treatment like TimeSplitters trilogy.
Simple a PC version of the game with support for latest hardware and operating systems and support for LAN or self hostable multiplayer would give these games new life among people not interested in modern multiplayer games.
no shit. a basic graphics overhaul and add mp features would bring in so much money and many fans. the fans of the og consoles are older and have money now, we yearn for simpler times and not being tethered to drm single player games and shitty cash grabs.
shit, id buy a remaster Mario 64 or GoldenEye in a heartbeat.
And at the same time, I’m slowly collecting copies of all the old games I used to play, and some I didn’t play as a kid. I just picked up a damn near pristine copy of Gundam Battle Assault 2 for $40. The game basically never fluctuated in value in about 20 years time and I find that hilarious.
it doesn’t matter what these corporations ‘think’, anything they remake or whatever the hot term is, they will turn it into some trash with a store. That’s NOT why people are seeking games from an era where this cancer didn’t exist.
Companies get pissy because fans are having fun and not paying again or constantly via subscriptions
Company ‘remakes’ game to justify IP, does piss poor job, changes things that never needed to be changed and adds in-game store or subscription model because ‘new market conditions’ and ‘inset other buzz words’
Gamers detest all changes and move onto the next old school gem.
But that’s not the cycle chronicled in this article. These are old games released onto subscription services in their original versions, more or less, give or take some resolution.
Disagreements over the direction of the Interactive division, chaotic departures, communication breakdowns, and a perceived lack of leadership transparency at Annapurna Interactive led to a staff walk-out that has left 25 individuals jobless, Annapurna leaders scrambling, and numerous developers concerned about their contracts with the publisher.
It has to hit a serious breaking point for an entire department to do this.
I’ve been in jobs where the whole dept disconnects and just keeps accepting a paycheck while waiting out the storm. So it must have been really really bad.
As someone who’s never played any Yakuza game, what even is this series? Are you not playing as a Japanese gangster or something? Why are you now an actual pirate?
Yes the mainline games are you playing a gang member (im not sure about the new protag though}. I think this is the second time piece spinoff that tells a different story, they just reuse the previous cast as new characters. Like a Dragon: Isshin is the first game like this
It is has a serious narrative about crime, politics, family issues, corruption and honor. And in the next scene you’re spending thousands of dollars (yens?) on a custom toy car to win a slot car championship or building your own go kart and race against other gangster.
Let’s just say that this is not too out of the ordinary.
Oh to be someone outside, looking in at this series… It must look absolutely insane lol. As someone who’s been playing these games for years now, this feels right at home for this series to me.
The Yakuza games alternate wildly between being extremely serious dramas about underworld crime, and extremely light hearted and wacky side quests. Some people might find the change in tone breaks immersion, but I find the two extremes increase the impact of each other. When a game is serious all the time I get numb to it, there needs to be a variety of lighthearted content for me to really feel the impact of when things get heavy.
In basically every Yakuza/Like a Dragon game, you play as a former Yakuza who continues to interact with both yakuzas and civillians. Generally speaking, the core story is VERY melodramatic but the sub stories (short side quests) are zany and incredibly horny (one of the most famous ones involved Kiryu teaching a sex worker how to be a dominatrix… at a children’s playground) with generally a really zany side story (longer side quest) where you might own a cabaret club or play pokemon with homeless people or whatever.
That said, Ichiban and Majima (the player character of this installment) tend to have MUCH zanier adventures. Because Kiryu is sort of kind of above it whereas Ichiban is a mentally ill guy who grew up with video games and Majima is half “I act crazy to protect those I love” and half “I am batshit fucking insane”.
So what I expect from this? Incredibly zany opening as an amnesiac Goro Majima comes to terms with waking up in Hawaii (the R in RGG stands for “Reuse excessively”). And he’ll become a pirate to fight all the evil pirates (past games had Kiryu lead an army to fight against NJPW wrestlers who had armies of their own) but also likely rob some fools what need robbing because…
Kiryu semi-officially does not kill (it is ambiguous and unclear how much is a meme based on a mistranslation). Majima leaves huge piles of corpses in his wake.
And then, around chapter 6 or so, we’ll find out why Majima is in Hawaii. Shooting my shot (and obviously spoiler tagging it) but I expect
spoilerSaejima to be dead since I didn’t notice him in the trailer and the baby tiger is both a reference to Saejima (his tattoo is a tiger) and is the kind of pet/companion Majima can “inherit” going forward. And I expect RGG to want to reuse the Memoirs system to give Majima the same spotlight Kiryu got and losing his best friend for 40 or 50 years at this point will do that. Also… Saejima still has a LOT of baggage from one really shitty cutscene in 4, And at this point I can only think of two things that would break Majima and RGG knows we would fly out to Shinagawa and burn their studio to the ground if they dare hurt Makoto again.
At its core, the Yakuza games are incredibly heartfelt Japanese Crime Dramas with Soap Opera plots weaved in. Sometimes you are a criminal and sometimes you are someone caught up in it all. You usually have a very personal stake in the overall story whether it is protecting your kids or figuring out what really happened to your baseball career. But always, you are someone who cares about those that society ignores (homeless people, sex workers, trans folk, former yakuza, etc) who is inevitably willing to stand up against the forces of light and darkness to protect them. Because the yakuza/LAD games are not about being a modern day yakuza. They are about the ideal of the yakuza of olde.
For those unaware, most criminal organizations rise to power because of a lack of protection from the government. Many predominantly African American or Latino gangs very much “began” to protect their communities from racism and bigotry. And Warrior was a show that depicted this with Chinese triads in turn of the century San Francisco. They were far from altruistic organizations but they fulfilled a role the cops actively refused to (often fighting against the cops themselves). And, over the decades, efforts are made to villify them which results in nobody “good” joining which, in turn, results in only the worst of the worst joining.
In Japan, this very much happened with the yakuza. Getting into their feudal counterparts is complex but the LAD games touch on this with Hiroshima in 6. Following the war, the Japanese government was in shambles and a lot of people were left to fend for themselves. Crime families stepped in to act as small mini governments and protect and provide for Their people (for a totally modest fee…). But, over the decades, the Japanese government did a spectacular job of villifying the yakuza to the point that only the most evil fuckers join (many of Takashi Miike’s movies touch on this. And he even did a LAD short film back in the day)
Which is where the games come in. Kiryu, Ichiban, and Yagami and their crews are very much what a yakuza SHOULD be. They are people who have forsaken their role in polite society because they want to protect those who can’t protect themselves. They are far from perfect but that is how you get those sharp contrasts of partying it up and fighting off hordes of drunk salarymen for fun to realizing a group of sex workers have been abducted and are being trafficked to who knows where all in the name of “progress”.
And its how you get those cliche anime bullshit moments of the evil crime lord you have been feuding with the first half of the game suddenly becomes one of your strongest allies when it is revealed that a government organization is brutalizing people. Because he also feels the same way and agrees that putting a stop to this Evil is far more important than who has control of a street.
It’s one of those series that has expanded so far, with favoritism towards its characters, that they even decided to drop the name “Yakuza” in favor of the Japanese title, since so much of it has little to do with being a Yakuza anymore. Honestly, I can’t remember any game in which you’ve done actual Yakuza-like actions such as shaking down businesses, running loan shark scams, or executing hits. When you do end up making money, it’s through perfectly legitimate businesses whose biggest problem is “thugs keep attacking us!”
I’ve been calling it the Soap Opera of gaming since first playing Lost Judgment.
The games are about various yakuza/ex-yakuza just living their best lives basically. The main plot differs from game to game, but most of them are what I would call an “every game.” It’s got a little bit of everything; the majority of them are absolutely batshit insane side missions and mini games while the main game is a brawler/dialogue heavy RPG.
If you like video games and anime, this is a series for you because it’s basically both at once and every game is both self-contained and enjoyable on its own, but also references past games a lot and has impeccable continuity.
This one with pirates I have a feeling is going to be a lot like Infinite Wealth with Kasuuga being either one of if not the main character. He has a super wild imagination; every time you get into combat in Infinite Wealth, everyone changes to some fantastical creature or hero. Like you get into a fight with some drunk business men and suddenly they’re fire breathing zombies. It’s great.
I really like this game a lot. I know it has problems, but it’s the first time since Dirty Bomb that an online shooter was able to grab me. I just really love objective based shooters, that way I can still be useful even though my aim isn’t the best.
I just play shotgun healer and push the objective. The spread on the gun allows me to have a decent amount of kills while also healing teammates and getting closer to the win.
If they improve netcode and hitreg that game will be awesome. Fast respawns, fast rounds, shooting feels good. It is fun if you don’t want to commite alot.
It made fairly big waves when it was released— mostly covered by cod influencers and the like. Their big selling point was “no sbmm”. I’ve thought about giving it a shot, since it can run on Linux under proton.
It’s alright, I played for a little bit after it released cause I was bored.
At the time, the queue times were fairly long and the game length was either very quick or a reasonable match length, no in between. It seemed like most people liked one character and anyone playing anyone else was new. At the time, it was very fast paced, but very floaty. There was also not a lot of impact on some of the guns, no real feeling of recoil on the sniper or the SMG.
I’m sure that has changed in the few weeks-~month since I haven’t played. It’s a fun point and clicker, but with the length of the queue times I’d rather play something else.
Not sure why companies try to push mobile games like that so fucking hard. Just because everyone has a phone doesn’t mean everyone wants to play games on them.
Also doesn’t help that practically all mobile games like that are created with the intention to focus on microtransactions and grindy paywalled and timegated content.
Can’t say anything of value was lost with sacking studios/devs for this kind of crap. It would only be better if it were the higher-ups coming up with this garbage for once.
Not sure why companies try to push mobile games like that so fucking hard. Just because everyone has a phone doesn’t mean everyone wants to play games on them.
Mobile games make more revenue than PC and console gaming combined. Of course companies are gonna try to get a bigger and bigger piece of that pie.
Diablo Immortal made a depressing amount of money.
Us sweats mean nothing when there’s a billion dollars on the table for them.
And this isn’t even a edgecase. Even Bethesda/Nintendo saw their mobile games print money more than their regular games. Fortunately they have souls and think about their core audience.
This is the thing I don’t get. Long-Term they will make way more money if their mobile games are good otherwise they get a reputation for putting out crap and overall less interest the next time around. The best long-term strategy would be to put in effort, especially when the return is so good.
Playing first person shooter on a mobile phone sounds like literally the worst possible experience. You need physical controls for accuracy touch screens are terrible for that plus of course you’re obscuring a good chunk of the screen with your fingers.
There are a few good mobile games, although I admit not many, but the good ones work with the limitations of the medium rather than trying to simply brute force through them. Good ones include things like Hitman Go, Threes, And a fairly possible Eve Online mobile game, which was only really let down by being Eve Online.
I recently randomly came across a youtube channel of someone criticizing Phil Spencer…
…who in that very video, described herself as an Ex-MSFT executive producer for multiple failed or non successful games in the early 00’s, but blamed the failures on everyone else around her.
These people have literally zero self awareness.
They have absurdly massive egos and senses of entitlement, they all do exactly what they criticize other people for.
Ok, so, she didn’t criticize Spencer in the same video she describes herself as an ex-MSFT executive producer… she’s criticizing the Concord producers… for basically poorly managing the development.
Here she is in an earlier vid criticizing Spencer:
And here is the later Concord vid where she basically blames the devs of multiple MSFT projects she was an executive producer on for just not listening to her.
Like… I agree with her general message of ‘feedback from players is important’ and ‘don’t vastly misjudge your target demo’ but like… you were the executive producer and … you say your dev teams weren’t listening to yourself, who you are portraying yourself as the player advocate…
So … shut down development if they won’t listen? Pull the funding, or threaten to?
Or, if you were just an advisor and tangential contributor with no real power… then what was your job?
What were you being paid for? Talking at people for them to not listen to you so you could then be smug about it later and just bounce around companies based off of your own clout?
To me this is the exact kind of bullshit that leads to games with massively inflated budgets and design by committee:
You have all these corpos that don’t really do anything other than have mixed at best track records, who all act holier than thou and all are somehow involved in development basically so they can network and build their resumes, with little to no actual care that their unnecessary involvement blows up entire studios and ruins the careers of actual coders, level designers, artists, etc who actually make the game.
All these excess people who just generate conflicting demands and unnecessary meetings and emails that require extensive reworks… otherwise known as bad management.
Specifically to Concord, we saw how the lead art design person on twitter went from towing the company line about how great the whole project was to basically flipping 180⁰ after the game was canned and saying that development was excruciating with art being redone and redone by committee and then all the higher ups refusing to acknowledge any of their role in the process.
Its… Its the nature, seemingly, of nearly every single large studio these days that corporate office politics rules all, everyone has to play the game of humoring all the opinions of these overpaid execs, and then when shit blows up, nobody takes accountability for anything and everyone instantly becomes piranhas seeking a scapegoat.
When your predecessor was Don Mattrick, it’s not like you have to perform that great to be better.
They need Peter Moore back, he’s the only leader of Xbox/Microsoft Games that’s ever been any good - he took Xbox from zero to its peak golden age, then he left and we got the dark age of Kinect.
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